Embracing the cozy; or, MFAs and Me

(Part 1: A History of the Universe Until Now, With Some Significant Exceptions)

1. Several Jokes and No Laughs

I have this joke I like to tell these days, which makes sense to only a very small group of people: I don’t like games.

In front of that very small group of people, I will wave my arms, make extravagant faces, and demand in robust tones that everyone absolutely ignore the growing pile of academic credits, published nonfiction, and literal games that now list me in the credits. Because I don’t like games! This is established! Pay no attention to the degree program behind the curtain!

I tell this joke because it’s easier than trying to figure out how to avoid the punchline of an older witticism, similarly known to a select group of people, which is: I’m getting an MFA.

(I will pause here for groans from the genre editors I grew up listening to, the agents who have proudly stated they’ve never knowingly represented authors who went to school to write rather than just, you know, writing— even the fellow writers who either share the opinion of the editors and agents or, like myself, attempt to couch their degree is obfuscated terms before quickly changing the subject.)

I’ve been trying to figure out how to write about my fall from grace– that is, my application and subsequent acceptance into an MFA degree program– for over a year now. It seemed impossible to approach, even though I kept skirting around the edges of it with mentions of work I’d done, lightly passing over large accomplishments as if they were part of a shiny new interest I was idly considering rather than a core element of the academic degree I am, even now, pursuing.

What’s worse, though, is that I can’t just set the whole thing aside as baseless prejudice. There is much to decry over American MFA degree programs for creative writing. I have a whole separate post to write about that, with all sorts of nifty nooks and crannies about class disparity, the prevalence of internet scams, hustle culture, cyclical echo chambers, art versus commerce, the Sci-Fi Ghetto, the predatory nature of academic publishing– there’s lots to say about this! And the awful reputation that MFA programs have within genre publishing is, for better or for worse, not entirely unearned.

But this is not that post.

2. Truth Coming Out of Her Well to Shame Me in Particular

Rewind a few years. I had, for some time, been considering that whole “future” thing and what I really wanted out of it. I had the niggling idea that, since I really liked talking about creative writing, and I coincidentally had a Personal Vendetta against the early 2000s-era liberal-arts approach toward teaching creative writing (A DIFFERENT POST), maybe I could… try… teaching…?

Knowing what I know about academia, I determined that adjuncting alone would be no better than what I was doing already, and with considerably less security. A Professor of Practice position was an option, but they’re few and far between unless I was interested in moving at the drop of a hat and a significant distance. Which left, finally, actual full-time faculty positions… but those all require terminal degrees, and Reader, I do Not have one of those just lying around.

…Unless I chose to get a Masters in Fine Arts, which is, itself, a terminal degree.

But that would be time! Money! And also, as all my prior history in the genre industry had told me, Very Silly!

Besides, maybe I didn’t even like teaching. Maybe it would be awful. In fact, I should test it out first, maybe by teaching some continuing ed courses or something, before I jumped onto such a ridiculous idea.

In brief: It took only one class to discover that, tragically, I fucking loved teaching. Which meant, I realized to my dawning horror, that I probably did have an MFA (yuck pitoouie) in my future.

(…If not immediately obvious, the “I really like teaching!” thing is not the only tragic love I would discover over the course of this history.)

(A very small group of people, perhaps even the very one that finds my “I don’t like games” joke funny, is now nodding their collective heads and grinning widely.)

3. A Murder of Crows, a Scope-Bleed of Game Designers

My day job is at a college. Theoretically, I can take courses there for free or at a significant discount– awesome. But it is also a polytechnic college, and therefore I had assumed there would not be something so unscientific as an MFA peering through its windows, giggling in its media labs, tempting tender STEM students from their intended majors with the promise of reasonable sleep schedules and sometimes also cookies.

As it turned out, though, the college did have an MFA program– exactly one, in fact: Interactive Media and Game Design, housed within the interdisciplinary IMGD program.

It took the better part of a summer for my now-advisor to convince me that IMGD was not, in fact, solely about games (because, as we have very much established, games are anathema unto me) but could encompass a plethora of other interesting things. My odd hobbies around experimental archaeology? Yes! My fascination with the folk process? Also yes! My weird obsession with the relationship between audience, art, and artist? Very much yes.

So… I applied. And I was accepted. And for the longest time, I was sure I could stay aloof from it– get in, get a grade, get out, no existential revelations or lifechanging malarkey here, by gum. Not on my watch.

Which brings me, strangely, to today. When I opened up a note file with an early draft of something, and then compared it to a later draft, and suddenly realized the later, more complete draft no longer felt right…

All because of a project called Memoirscape— the subject of part 2 of this update.